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Inaugurated in 1857 by New York's Harper Brothers publishers, by 1863 Harper's Weekly had the widest circulation of the three weekly illustrated newspapers. Its popularity among northern readers was largely engendered by pictorial war reportage, composed of wood engravings based on the work of artist-reporters and photographers on the battlefield and in the boot camp. Like its war coverage, the Weekly's depiction of the July 1863 Draft Riots expressed its support of the Republican Party and Union cause as well as its antipathy toward people and institutions who opposed or disrupted the war effort, in particular poor Irish Catholic immigrants and the Copperhead (pro-southern) wing of the Democratic party. The distinction was perhaps most starkly presented in this Weekly depiction of bestial children and women in the vicinity of Twentieth Street and First Avenue cavorting about the corpse of a sergeant from the Fourteenth New York Cavalry. |
Draft Riots 1863 - Murder of Colonel O' Brien
